Leaping From The Box

Have you ever considered how important to the community the public school is? As a homeschooler, I would love to say that it is not important at all, but that is just not true. While living in rural Alabama, we discovered that the opportunities for getting to know your neighbors were pretty slim if you did not attend the local public school. Churches and the public school seem to be the main social outlets in the small towns across the country, and, to a lesser extent, that is the case for the city also.

In my article Valid Reasons for Homeschooling I include a quote by Michael Farris (HSLDA) on this very idea. At the time I wrote that article, I had just begun to think about the future of the public schools, what they were now and would they could be. It is a topic that I consider now and again and a blog post this morning on SharpBrains, The Brain Fitness Authority, caused me to be cautiously hopeful about the future structure of public schools. Schools as Brain Training Hubs? quotes a retired public school superintendent, Scott Spears:

Schools will be structured around the acquisition of foundational cognitive skills, related physical fitness to support brain fitness, student awareness and knowledge of brain function and responsibility for one’s own fitness. Schools will be much more organically structured along the learning needs of individuals, will be a community repository and asset for access to continuing brain and physical fitness programming, and will continue to provide important content knowledge acquisition experiences delivered through integrated experiential learning, custom-designed for the individual learner, and varying by time and place as needed.

The nature of schooling is thus liberated from the current model of emphasis on content acquisition to become more focused on the teacher-student interface of interest-directed learning undergirded by the skills necessary for high-order thinking and learning.

It is reassuring to know that there are at least a few (retired) public school officials that can see beyond what education is today. My ideal public school is a combination of public school / community college / senior center / parks & recreation / public library. Something for all ages, all abilities, all needs. Available on an as needed, as wanted basis. Pie in the sky? Perhaps. What would you like to see?

My note from The Universe this morning:

The greatest gift a parent can give a child, Karen, is the ability to become independently happy.

And the greatest gift a child can give a parent is exercising that ability.

This is a good note for me today. I think I have mentioned previously that our 2 year old granddaughter (2.5 in just a few more weeks) is living with us now, along with her mommy. Her mommy (our daughter) is going back to college for a degree, along with working part-time. So while Mommy is away from home and/or studying, Grandma (or rather Mum-Mum) gets the care of little Miss Munchkin. And it just so happens that Mum-Mum is in great demand even when Mommy is available. Most days, I don’t mind. Some days I do. I find it quite a different matter to have care of a toddler again at (close to) age 50 than I did at age 25. My patience level is not what it was and it seems that my hormones usually coincide with her bad days / teething days. Not a good combination, believe you me!

Miss Munchkin is normally pretty good at playing on her own, but she is only two and I have to continually remind myself of that as she pulls on my arm, wanting Mum-Mum to do this or that with her. Usually it’s just as I am attempting to click on something or do a cut-and-paste on the computer and the tug on my arm throws the mouse into some direction that I had no intention of taking it. Plus she is just beginning to string words together into full sentences and many words are still not decipherable without actually seeing what she wants or needs or having her give the ASL sign. But she’s gaining on the language ability and I will keep working on my patience level. I thought I had this patience thing down to an art with my own children, but I guess I need more practice in its application!

In the coming months I will be chronicling Miss Munchkin’s unschooling adventures here, since she is the next generation unschooler in our household. My focus for many years has been on unschooling high school (transcripts, resources, preparation for college), but our youngest finished his homeschooling this spring, at just about the same time that Miss Munchkin moved in. So now my focus has turned to toddlerhood and the preschooling years. So stay tuned — see how well Mum-Mum makes the mental and physical leap from high school to preschool – and what new insights on unschooling Miss Munchkin will give Mum-Mum!

Sorry for my absence the past couple of weeks. Two weeks ago my granddaughter and I were the lucky ones in the family to share a stomach bug. Nasty stuff! And then last week I traveled north to Alabama to get our old home cleaned out and ready to list for sale. You would not believe the amount of books I disposed of!!! Over 500 went to the local public library as a donation. And probably that many more I brought back with me to list on e-bay. I already have close to 100 listed on my ebay store! So as you prepare for your upcoming school year, be sure to visit my LeapingFromTheBox E-bay store. If you don’t see what you need, check back later, as I will be adding listings daily for quite a few weeks. Math, history, English, science books galore!